From the earliest incursions into the Americas by Spanish explorers to the California Gold Rush and to the Oklahoma land rush, African Americans have been present at every frontier and have been ...
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From the earliest incursions into the Americas by Spanish explorers to the California Gold Rush and to the Oklahoma land rush, African Americans have been present at every frontier and have been active participants in transforming those frontier settlements into thriving communities. Those experiences have been represented in a variety of forms, memoirs, novels, film, and television, even as literary and cultural criticism has neglected that body of work. This chapter surveys the field of texts related to the African American West and establishes three central concepts for understanding those texts, erasure, double-consciousness, and the trickster tradition. All three concepts are representational strategies used by African American artists to adapt unfriendly and even hostile cultural narratives (such as the genre western) to articulate their own experiences.Less

Introduction

Michael K. Johnson

Published in print: 2014-02-01

From the earliest incursions into the Americas by Spanish explorers to the California Gold Rush and to the Oklahoma land rush, African Americans have been present at every frontier and have been active participants in transforming those frontier settlements into thriving communities. Those experiences have been represented in a variety of forms, memoirs, novels, film, and television, even as literary and cultural criticism has neglected that body of work. This chapter surveys the field of texts related to the African American West and establishes three central concepts for understanding those texts, erasure, double-consciousness, and the trickster tradition. All three concepts are representational strategies used by African American artists to adapt unfriendly and even hostile cultural narratives (such as the genre western) to articulate their own experiences.

Although Oscar Micheaux’s novel The Homesteader is clearly a western, it is also specifically an African American western, a revised version of the genre that is guided and informed by Micheaux’s ...
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Although Oscar Micheaux’s novel The Homesteader is clearly a western, it is also specifically an African American western, a revised version of the genre that is guided and informed by Micheaux’s belief in the goal of racial uplift. However, the promises of freedom, conquest, and transformed masculinity offered by the South Dakota frontier and the western genre seem available to the black man only through erasure—only if he assimilates thoroughly and abandons any sense of responsibility to others of his race. Micheaux’s protagonist Baptiste is caught between the conflicting goals of uplift and assimilation. Micheaux also uses the book’s primary settings (Chicago and South Dakota) to adapt the central structuring opposition of the western—the essential difference between the civilized East and the wild West—to articulate Baptiste’s sense of double-consciousness, his conflicting desires both to maintain and to erase his racial identityLess

“Try to Refrain from That Desire” : Self-Control and Violent Passion in Oscar Micheaux’s African American Western

Michael K. Johnson

Published in print: 2014-02-01

Although Oscar Micheaux’s novel The Homesteader is clearly a western, it is also specifically an African American western, a revised version of the genre that is guided and informed by Micheaux’s belief in the goal of racial uplift. However, the promises of freedom, conquest, and transformed masculinity offered by the South Dakota frontier and the western genre seem available to the black man only through erasure—only if he assimilates thoroughly and abandons any sense of responsibility to others of his race. Micheaux’s protagonist Baptiste is caught between the conflicting goals of uplift and assimilation. Micheaux also uses the book’s primary settings (Chicago and South Dakota) to adapt the central structuring opposition of the western—the essential difference between the civilized East and the wild West—to articulate Baptiste’s sense of double-consciousness, his conflicting desires both to maintain and to erase his racial identity

Era Bell Thompson in her North Dakota memoir American Daughter revises the traditional opposition of frontier literature—the difference between West and East, the wilderness and the metropolis—to ...
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Era Bell Thompson in her North Dakota memoir American Daughter revises the traditional opposition of frontier literature—the difference between West and East, the wilderness and the metropolis—to symbolize double-consciousness. Moving west to the frontier means separating from the black community and becoming part of a “strange white world.” American Daughter describes a sense of restless movement between West and East, reflecting the difficulty of that choice. As did Thompson, Rose Gordon grew up in a pre-dominantly white frontier community, White Sulphur Springs, Montana. In contrast to Thompson, who eventually moved to Chicago, Gordon spent her entire life in her western home. Juxtaposed here are different accounts of black western experience by two African American women. Rose Gordon’s writing—mostly contributions to her local newspaper—reflects her strategies for making home in one particular place, a story of settlement that converges and diverges with accounts of black western travel.Less

Michael K. Johnson

Published in print: 2014-02-01

Era Bell Thompson in her North Dakota memoir American Daughter revises the traditional opposition of frontier literature—the difference between West and East, the wilderness and the metropolis—to symbolize double-consciousness. Moving west to the frontier means separating from the black community and becoming part of a “strange white world.” American Daughter describes a sense of restless movement between West and East, reflecting the difficulty of that choice. As did Thompson, Rose Gordon grew up in a pre-dominantly white frontier community, White Sulphur Springs, Montana. In contrast to Thompson, who eventually moved to Chicago, Gordon spent her entire life in her western home. Juxtaposed here are different accounts of black western experience by two African American women. Rose Gordon’s writing—mostly contributions to her local newspaper—reflects her strategies for making home in one particular place, a story of settlement that converges and diverges with accounts of black western travel.